Lucy Mangan: Divide and rule begins at school

I went to a secondary school where the pupils never had a book each. All the years we were there, we shared one between two or three. Sometimes I take this fact out, place it carefully on the ground and stare at it in disbelief. I used to look for the positive. Ah, the 80s! Ra-ra skirts, neon make-up and a marked lack of public funds everywhere. It gave the family – my mother in the NHS, my dad in teaching, me and my sister in state education – so much to bond over.

This has always been my trouble, I think. I am too slow to anger. I should have become immediately and vociferously politicised the moment I realised that reading Animal Farm from a 60-degree angle (only the one in the middle got to sit upright) was an optimal approach solely to developing scoliosis, rather than an interest in literature.

Instead, as I try to negotiate my way through the rocky territory of life, it has taken fully 20 years of watching unsuspected chasms of ignorance yawn open beneath my feet to make me fully appreciate just how much we were bilked.

The heavy work of raising my flabby consciousness receives the occasional boost, of course, by news such as the Independent Schools Council's threat to take legal action against the Charities Commission for suggesting (that's "suggesting", not "stating what has since their inception been blindingly obvious but traditionally ignored") that some (again, that's "some", as opposed to "blindingly obviously, all") independent schools don't pass the public benefit test and – drum roll from young Fotherington-Thomas, who has been taking extra lessons in the specially-soundproofed music room in the west tower at 50 quid a pop on top of his £10,000-a-term fees – shouldn't really be classed as charities at all. I know. I know. You don't say.

There is nothing more pernicious than the educational divide in this country. It is as entrenched and detrimental to our national mental wellbeing as the health divide in the US. And, like the American health-care system, any attempt to recognise or reform it seems to antagonise not just those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, but also, somehow, many who would most benefit from the dismantling of it.

I once made the mistake of agreeing to appear on a late-night radio show. (A live radio phone-in is, I assure you, no place for anyone who describes herself as "slow to anger" – swift and insistent rage is what they are paying you for. Afterwards, people patted me gently and sent me home a broken woman.) The show was being broadcast on a day when the rising popularity of private schooling had been in the news, and I proffered on air the thought that, in broadbrush terms, this was as a result of the increasing difficulties faced by state schools, and that if we outlawed private schools, then vast gouts of financial and social capital would be pumped into the state system and eliminate many of its problems in one fell swoop.

I got shat on from a great height by an assortment of callers. Some were putting their children through private school, others were planning to and had been saving desperately since before the child's birth, and many mourned the fact that they had "only" had a state education themselves. Not one caller gave any quarter to the idea that a redistribution of the resources husbanded by the independents could benefit individual pupils and wider society in a surely more egalitarian future. No one believed in anything other than the "right" to buy the "best" education possible for their child.

So that's where we are. It seems that They have successfully persuaded Us that there is no other way for the system to be run. The best we can hope is to save enough to buy our children a few crumbs from the richest of cakes one day. Until then, maybe some extra books will do. Though I wouldn't bother with Animal Farm.